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A trip to your favorite seafood joint could soon bring a higher tab for your dinner, which restaurateurs are blaming on tariffs.
Some restaurants and retailers are raising their prices because, they say, tariffs are making it more expensive to source their seafood, which is frequently imported from abroad.
But hospitality industry consultant Jonathan Horowitz cautioned against simple explanations.
“Tariffs are the newest thing,” he said. “It’s easy to talk about those, whereas the reality is it has gotten more and more expensive to operate restaurants over the past few years because of all sorts of cost increases. That includes rent, and labor and materials and food costs.”
Horowitz points to a steady rise in inflation, particularly since the covid pandemic, which has been painful for the hospitality industry, restaurants in particular, as they deal with rising expenses of business, even as they operate on tight budgets of their own.
“Restaurants are surviving already on extraordinarily thin margins,” he pointed out. “So I think consumers are going to have to understand that, if they want their favorite restaurants to stick around, they might have to deal with higher menu prices. Because restaurants unfortunately don’t have much of a choice in that regard.”